In France, this notion caused rage and dismay. The king, Philip the Fair, was in character not unlike the pope – vain, aggressive and inclined to display and extravagance. As a result, he was permanently in need of money, and to cut off his church revenues caused him acute distress. He reacted promptly by cutting off all the pope’s revenues from France – that is, by issuing an edict forbidding money to leave the country. At the same time, the English king Edward I outlawed the clergy. Within a year, Boniface was practically compelled to withdraw Clericis Laicos. He tried to placate Philip by canonising his ancestor Louis IX.
Once again dreaming of power and grandeur, the pope proclaimed the year 1300 a ‘Jubilee Year’, a year for rejoicing, when anyone who came to Rome would receive automatic remission of sins. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flocked to Rome; hundreds of thousands of pounds flowed into the papal treasury. It was, says Frederick Heer in The Medieval World, 1150-1300, ‘the first example of the manipulation of the masses for a political end’. The great procession itself was like a combination of a Roman triumph and a Nuremberg Rally. The pope was preceded by two swords, symbolising his spiritual and earthly dominion, and heralds went ahead crying: ‘I am caesar, I am emperor!’ Gold coins were showered on the tomb of St Peter at such a pace that two croupiers had to pull them in with rakes. All this money was intended by the pope for the subjection of Sicily – that old quarrel still dragged on – and to press his claim as the real emperor of Europe.
The quarrels between Boniface and Philip the Fair began to blow up again. A haughty papal legate gave great offence to Philip with his insolent manners, but since he was the pope’s ambassador, there was nothing the king could do about it. However, the legate happened to be a French bishop, and as soon as his term as ambassador expired, Philip had him arrested, tried for blasphemy and disrespect for royalty, and thrown into prison. The pope was outraged – and began to be alarmed when Philip spoke about appointing future bishops himself instead of leaving it to Rome. In 1302 he issued a bull called Unam sanctum that went farther than anything before in asserting the pope’s superiority to kings and emperors. (It has since become something of an embarrassment to the Church, which has been obliged to declare that nothing in it is ‘divinely inspired’ except its last line – about there being no salvation outside the Church). He went on to threaten to depose Philip and excommunicate him.
Philip’s response was to call a meeting of the French equivalent of parliament, the Estates General, which denounced the pope as a heretic and said many other harsh things about him. (Modern research has shown that the heresy charge was not unfounded – it seems probable that Boniface did not believe in the immortality of the soul.) Then Philip sent off a kind of commando unit to Italy to kidnap the pope. This was done with the aid of an Italian family that the pope had offended, the Colonnas. The conspirators went to the pope’s town of Anagni, where he was spending the summer of 1303. With the complicity of the townspeople – who also seem to have had their grudges – they besieged him in his palace, and burst in as he was about to issue the bull excommunicating Philip. During the next few days, it seems fairly certain that the pope was roughly handled by his captors, although he refused to give way to their demands. They were prepared to drag him back to France to stand trial when the townspeople of Anagni experienced a change of heart and rescued him. But the sudden recognition of his own vulnerability had broken the pope’s will. He went back to Rome – where he was made prisoner by some of his enemies – and died soon after.
What we can see – and what the vainglorious and arrogant Boniface was entirely unable to see – is that he never stood the slightest chance of success in realising Hildebrand’s dream of papal domination. He had not even noticed how much the world had changed. Frederick II might be dead, but his spirit was alive and was transforming the world. It was against that spirit that Boniface had broken his head – not against the arrogant stupidity of Philip the Fair. The whole of France was behind Philip in telling the pope to keep his nose out of foreign affairs. And as the news of the ‘kidnapping’ and its sequel spread, the rest of Europe smiled sarcastically.
Philip’s rather underhand schemes continued to prosper. The next pope died – probably of poison – within a year. And Philip made sure that his successor was a Frenchman – a Gascon, Clement V. And Philip bribed or persuaded him not to go to Rome but to transfer the seat of the papacy to Avignon. There he lived in a huge and luxurious palace. This ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the papacy lasted for seventy-three years, during which time most of the popes thoroughly enjoyed themselves – in fact, gave the papacy a bad name for self-indulgence – and, naturally, lent a sympathetic ear to the demands of the French king.
With the pope in Avignon, Philip turned his attention back to the question of how to make money. Somebody’s pocket had to be picked, and one obvious candidate was the wealthy order of knights known as the Templars. They were very rich – they had often lent the king money – and very powerful. Founded in the Holy Land after the success of the first crusade, they had originally been housed in a wing of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The Holy Land was, as we have seen, a dangerous place during the Middle Ages, and the Knights Templar had been decimated again and again in battles with the Saracens and finally ejected by the sultan Baybars in 1303. Their immense wealth had been bequeathed to them mainly by grateful crusaders whom they had nursed through sickness or injury. Philip had applied to join them, and had actually been rejected. For a man of his childish temperament, this was an insult that had to be avenged.
Ex-Templars were interrogated, and the king soon had a list of hair-raising accusations, such as homosexuality, worshipping a demon called Baphomet (in the form of a wooden penis) and spitting on the cross. The accusations were an imaginative compilation of the medieval ideas about black magic and demons, complete with naked virgins, female demons and endless sodomy.
Secret orders went out, and at daybreak on 13 October 1307, the authorities swooped, and almost every Templar in France was arrested. It was important to work fast, in case there was a public outcry – a matter like this could so easily turn into a boomerang that would make Philip a laughing stock. Disappointingly, there proved to be no documentary evidence of the abominations of which they were accused, and the treasure of the Templars was not found either – it seems fairly certain that they had advance warning and spirited it away. So Philip had the knights tortured horribly – so horribly that thirty-six of them died within a day or two. The new pope in Avignon issued a bull ordering the arrest of all Templars in all lands, and for three years Templars were tortured and tried. It was a nauseating farce, and Philip had not gained by it a fraction of the wealth he had expected. But it had to be carried through. In 1312, the pope admitted that there was not enough evidence to prove heresy; nevertheless, he dissolved the order. The tragedy came to an end in March 1314. Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Templars, who had been in prison for seven years, was exposed in front of Notre Dame to make a public confession. To everyone’s dismay, he declared that his only offence was to lie under torture; he insisted that the order was pure and that the charges were false. Nevertheless, at sunset, on the Ile de Palais in the Seine, he was slowly roasted to death over a fire. The story went around that the last words of the dying man had been a summons to the pope and the king to meet him in front of God’s throne one year hence, for judgement. Oddly enough, both the pope and the king died within that year.
And so, after the long halt of the Middle Ages, like a train waiting for hours in a country station, history began to rumble forward again. Now that the temporal power of the popes was broken, and thee new universities – Oxford (founded 1264), Bologna, Paris, Naples – were beginning to revive the learning of the ancients, the world seemed set for exciting changes. A university was not necessarily a conglomeration of professors, each teaching his own subject; it might, like the University of Paris, spring up around one man – the controversial theologian Peter Abelard – as the Academy of Athens had sprung up around Socrates; what mattered was that it was vitally interested in ideas. For the first time since the ancient Greeks, people were thinking again. Oddly enough, the legal system of Justinian became the subject of enthusiastic study. But this was because men no longer took it for granted that the Church was the one and only authority on matters of right and wrong; they wanted to discuss the whole concept of justice.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175